We Have a Dream

To read my art review about New York artists who team up with ART FOR CHANGE to create the Park of Dreams installation project in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza in the Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art today by clicking the link here: Artists Team Up with ART FOR CHANGE and Prospect Park Alliance for “Park of Dreams” Project

By Stephen Wozniak

Park of Dreams
February-April 2024

Grand Army Plaza
Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch
20 Grand Army Plaza
Brooklyn, NY 11238

ART FOR CHANGE
Art For Change Website

EXCERPT 

“A park is a work of art, as much as a painting or a sculpture. It must have an intrinsic beauty that appeals to the eye, but it must also have a deeper meaning that touches the soul.”

― Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect and designer of Prospect Park

A lovely, refreshing work in this public presentation is that of Cydne Jasmin Coleby, entitled Remembering II, 2020. The central bikini-clad female figure in this collage sits on a beach towel, looks out across a lake and takes in a moment of peace. Her body, like Key’s Man—similarly coordinated in form and color to her surroundings—shows us an inherent connection to the nature nearby. The eye-bouncing contrast of textures—from a dimpled, heavyweight, watercolor paper sky and unbleached rag-as-sandscape to the many marbleized, decorative swirls of skin we see—gives extra life to this otherwise reflective scene for the figures in it.

Maria Calandra’s Time of the Zinnia, 2023, is a true head-spinner. There are none—and I mean zero—straight lines or rectilinear forms in this miraculous painting. Anchored by the bright and burning orange flowers of its namesake, followed by ruddy and spotted pink-petaled friends, this truly twisty-topsy-turvy work takes many eyeball-passes to tour its folding, curly terrain and ingest the inescapable trip that shows us what it means to be of nature and not simply in it. Time of the Zinnia reminds me a wee bit of Jackson Pollock’s early melting farmers, oxen and ploughs-in-action paintings—a ripple-vision take on the work of Thomas Hart Benton and the great 20^th-century Mexican muralists. Calandra’s piece, however, is so packed and saturated with floral life, which looks utterly ancient—or even timeless—that it seems so much more profound than those early works.

Participating artists in the ART FOR CHANGE Park of Dreams installation and print project include Marcus Brutus, Kelly Beeman, Alyssa Klauer, Danielle Orchard, Bianca Nemelc, Kirsten Deirup, Jon Key, Maria Calandra, Jules De Balincourt, Na’ye Perez, Cydne Jasmin Coleby and Amy Lincoln.

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